THIS WEEK’S BOOK

“A Disposition To Be Rich: How a Small-Town Pastor’s Son Ruined an American President, Brought on a Wall Street Crash, and Made Himself the Best-Hated Man in America”by Geoffrey C. Ward (Knopf, 420 pages, $28.95)

Try to imagine what it might be like to be directly descended from one of the worst swindlers in American history. Geoffrey C. Ward need not imagine it. He knows.

His great-grandfather, Ferdinand Ward, was a Bernie Madoff type of the late 19th century. The notion of writing a book about his infamous ancestor percolated in the author’s mind for decades. Only he could have written this.

He describes how he obtained crucial research material: “My grandfather didn’t much like to talk about his father, but I kept after him with a persistence that embarrasses me a little now. One day when I was visiting from college nearly 50 years ago he turned over to me a dusty cardboard carton filled with brittle papers tied into bundles with dirty twine.”

It was the mother lode: “They were the contents of Ferdinand Ward’s prison trunk, and had rested unread in the closet safe off my grandfather’s study in Oberlin, Ohio, for more than half a century: scores of letters, still in their envelopes; faded photographs; court documents bound with red ribbon; tiny scraps of paper covered on both sides with near-microscopic writing.”

He explains that this trunkload of material: “offered me the first real clues to what my greatgrandfather was like. But they also raised as many questions as they answered, and brought me no closer to grasping what made him the man he came to be. He may have been a sociopath, born without a conscience or the ability to empathize, able only to imitate emotions genuinely felt by other people.”

We meet Ferd’s parents. They were humorless and deeply religious. The first 90 pages of the book are somewhat tedious. After that, the pace quickens as Ferd’s personality develops. At an early age he became adept at cloaking greed and dishonesty beneath his deceptive charm. This was the evolution of a master con artist.

Ferd became a Wall